With the development of telecommunications and the Internet, various software and hardware systems become more and more complex, and requirements for the systems also become more and more diversified. To ensure high efficiency of the system, end-to-end (E2E) management of the complex requirements is needed, so as to guarantee complete requirements and prevent distortion or loss during transfer of requirements.
From the perspective of completeness of requirements, requirements of a user for a product are generally classified into two types: one is functional requirements, and the other is non-functional requirements. The functional requirements for the product refer to functions that the product needs to provide; and the non-functional requirements for the product refer to features, except the functional requirements, that the product should have in order to meet user service requirements, such as performance, reliability, maintainability, extensibility, and adaptability to technologies and to services. With the development and maturity of industrial standards, functions have become homogeneous among products, and with the continuous progress and popularization of technologies, availability of key technologies for implementing the functions is no longer a barrier; therefore, a competitive difference between products is embodied mainly in a difference in the non-functional aspect, and requirements of the user in the non-functional aspect are attracting more and more attention. During a process of practical research and development of the product, it is not enough to only meet the functional requirements, but professional division and management of the requirements is also needed. Major operators, equipment vendors and suppliers in the industry have corresponding requirement classification and management methods, where a common method is Design for X (DFX) classification method, which is also known as design for attribute classification method. For DFX, it is already systematically considered at the beginning of the design how to implement attributes of competitive non-functional requirements, so as to improve product quality and competitiveness. Existing DFX classification is shown in Table 1 below:
SerialAbbre-Full NameNumberviationFull Name in Englishin Chinese1DFAsDesign for Assembly 2DFADesign for Availability 3DFCDesign for Compatibility 4DFCpDesign for Compliance 5DFCSDesign for Component Substitute 6DFDDesign for Deployment 7DFDgDesign for Diagnosability 8DFEE&EDesign for Energy Efficiency and Environment9DFEnDesign for Environment 10DFEDesign for Extensibility 11DFEEDesign for Energy Efficiency 12DFFDesign for Flexibility 13DFGDesign for Globalization 14DFIDesign for Interoperability 15DFLDesign for Logistics 16DFMtDesign for Maintainability 17DFMDesign for Manufacturability 18DFPtDesign for Portability 19DFPDesign for Performance 20. . .
The foregoing DFX classification method involves a large number of scattered categories, among which a relationship cannot be recognized. As a result, management and design of quality attributes of non-functional requirements by directly using the foregoing DFX classification method is rather inefficient and cannot ensure completeness of the requirements.